#godekker is like no. actually i'm calling the cops

[artino-c]

Thinking again about the way MWT depicts slave naming conventions in CoK and TaT by giving us contradictory, neither-is-quite-accurate hot takes from the two different narrators:

Conspiracy of Kings:

"So, man-killer," he asked. "Do you have a name?" I thought before I answered. Wisdom is not a name for a slave. Stone, Mark, Faithful, Strong are slave names. I had a nurse once who named her son Shovel. She was a foreigner, from somewhere far north, and she told me that she liked the way it sounded.

Thick as Thieves:

"Not Immakuk," he said. "Godekker." Godekker--it's a decorative cord that fastens a scroll closed. No one, no matter how lowborn, would name a child after something so trivial. His master must have given him the name using the first word that popped into his head. I wondered that Godekker didn't change it now that he was a free man.

I love the way these two passages undermine and reinforce each other, both as a matter of worldbuilding (both Sophos' and Kamet's accounts are rooted in historical, real world practice) and as a way to underscore the limitations of both narrators' understanding of other people's experiences. In remembering his enslaved nurse, Sophos doesn't really acknowledge the dehumanization inherent in his first statement (some names are inappropriate/forbidden to slaves), or check any of his assumptions about how those rules ("wisdom is not a name for a slave") might have interacted with his nurse's apparent choice of name for her child. On the flip side, Kamet is so invested in pitying/patronizing Godekker the escaped field slave that it doesn't even occur to him that perhaps Godekker also knew his mother or could have been named by her.

It's also a great way to introduce Godekker, who functions in the story as an antagonist but is also textually correct about a lot of things (Kamet acknowledges this even as he isn't happy about it), and who constantly resists Kamet's attempts to impose his own terms on all their interactions. Anyone who reads the books back to back and remembers that first passage would know to immediately question Kamet's first assumptions about Godekker!